The Tragedy of Compassionless Convictions
There’s a line written by the great Irish poet William Butler Yeats that I’ve been struggling with much of my life. Quoted and misquoted by everyone from presidential candidates to the rocker Lou Reed, it notes that, “The best lack all conviction while the worst are filled with passionate intensity.”
Buried in a poem written during (and about) the aftermath of World War I, when everyone was still reeling from the millions who died from the advent of modern warfare (and nationalism), the lines were originally designed to be read ironically… or at least so I was told by several English Literature professors over the years. “The Second Coming,” they said, was about how a world turns upside down. It was a warning.
As a young man, and a dreamer, I wanted my life to be all conviction, and filled as much as possible with passionate intensity. When I now look at my two year old son, I hope the same for him.
And yet, for whatever reason, it was these lines that first came into my mind last week when first I read about the murder/suicide involving the radical right wing ideologue “Yankee Jim” Leshkevich and his popular wife, Onteora teacher aide Deborah Leshkevich
. Even before I started searching through his blogs to try and glean some clues as to why he did what he did to his wife, this sweet woman we’d all gotten to know as owner of one of the brighter smiles in the local school system, it was Yeats who spoke to my conscience, my soul.
I found, through several interviews over the years, that Yankee Jim played the role of a classic hatemonger. He was the instigator behind the neo-Nazi rallies in Kingston a few years back. He was the man to call when looking to cast a local gun show in its scariest light. And yet, accessible and almost jovial, there was something about the man that seemed to be play acting. He seemed nicer than the beliefs he espoused. Which is why so many, including our area’s daily newspaper – and so many more of us, without their unfortunate prompting – turned to Yankee Jim’s blog to see HOW he went off the deep end so tragically.
And probably why I was so instantly reminded of Yeats’ deeply confusing, and disturbing lines. And why I felt the need to look as deep inside as possible to ponder how it is we become who we are, with all that is possible within those characters we end up being.
In Yankee Jim’s blog, he suddenly broke off after years of bitching and moaning about race and gender matters, about all he saw wrong with the world and in need of some form of violent change, and wrote about his own life… or what he saw of it via the conspiratorial lens he had taken for his only sight for so long. He used the same sort of breathless argumentation to build a case for the ways he had been victimized… and then abruptly cut off, as if filled with his own venom to the level he needed to commit the heinous crimes he terminated his and his wife’s lives with.
Did his politics come out of something personal, or did the politics dirty his own personality? These are the questions we unfortunately ask ourselves over and over again as a society, making understandable everything from genocide to cheating, from bad-mouthing others to torture and murder. Or revenge in the name of justice.
Is it dangerous, as Yeats inferred, to have too much conviction, to be filled with too much passionate intensity? Or is it simply that the best rewards come to those who don’t push too hard, who temper all convictions and passions, all their intensity, with compassion and a sense of how one’s actions always affect others?
Fortunately, I had help this past week reaching my own new answer to this lifelong quandary.
First, I had to write an obituary for a woman whose life seemed to have been all about convictions and passionate intensity… the late political activist Jane Van De Bogart of Woodstock. Did she counter what Yeats was saying, as evidenced in the Yankee Jim tragedy?
Searching for the key to Jane, as it were, I found that although she had great convictions, she was above all else a compassionate humanist… there for people of all stripes who she felt were pressured. And so she never over-pressured anyone with her beliefs, or let her passions become so intense as to hurt others. Which is why, I believe, she passed away so beloved.
Then I learned a lesson from my father (himself a former English Lit professor), and the way he refused to attend the recent funeral of his cousin’s wife of 50 years because he and the man he had grown up with like brothers, out on a Missouri farm in the middle of nowhere, believed differing things now. As my dad said, what were convictions if they weren’t to be stood by… matters of religion and politics and overall world view?
Nothing but words, I wanted to tell him after this process of thought got hold of me. Nothing but passions divorced from the actuality of living together as people who share a world, like it or not. Nothing but ego trying to knock down the idea of community that’s at the basis of civilization.
People close to him were hurt. That was what mattered most. Not any of his own hurts.
So now I finally see these Yeats lines differently. As the basis for a lifelong struggle towards meaning and effectuality that I doubt I could have gotten were it not for my now having my own boy to hold and comfort, and a community of readers to try and interpret local politics and tragedies, as well as opportunities and celebrations, for.
“A terrible beauty is born,” Yeats wrote in another poem the same year he wrote “The Second Coming.”
Terrible, I now figure, in its inevitability and our own inability to face deep questions without some form of fear. But beautiful in the way all things human, or living for that matter, must be, in the end, understood. In the way my son, now two, will eventually learn these lessons himself one day.
We’ll be back after Easter… and St. Patrick’s Day. Time for us all to take a breather. See you in a month…
PS